


In Song I Cut Great Stones

by katuman



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Multi, rise and fall of the aztec empire, unrequited lust of the hellfire variety
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 08:04:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14588631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katuman/pseuds/katuman
Summary: In the beginning, there was a lake.





	In Song I Cut Great Stones

_Proud of itself is the city of México-Tenochtitlan._  
 _Here no one fears to die in war. This is our glory._  
 _Who could conquer Tenochtitlan?_  
 _Who could shake the foundation of heaven?_  
—Cantares Mexicanos, fol. 19 v.-20

 

In the beginning, there was a lake.   
  
The little Tenochca stood watching the smoke rise from the Tepanec cities on the opposite shore, over the lakebeds where people like her planted maize and chayote. She was an island then, little more than that. She held out her hand, shut it tightly over the water, and squeezed.  
  


* * *

 

  
The woman called her a child, the way old people did when they spoke to her. _She_ called herself Tenochtitlan, because the first great speaker of the Méxica had carried her on his shoulders and had given her his name. He told her that God had made her a promise after they left their faraway home in Aztlán. They would wander and wander until Huitzilopochtli sent an eagle to show them the way. The eagle, it was said, perched on a nopale, on an island in the center of the lake.  
  
This she told the woman, Texcoco, who seemed so tall at the time, who plaited her own hair like a noblewoman and who touched her on the cheek.  
  
The woman called her "little sister”—and told her to come along.  
  


* * *

  
Texcoco always regarded her sternly in the way she approached men. In the way she lifted her eyes towards the Tepanec king and his advisor. “Eyes on the ground, Tenochca,” she whispered. “Good ladies don’t look.”  
  
Texcoco always kept her head down when men spoke to her, but Tenochtitlan, she fidgeted, casting a sideways glance at the stonework, the sandals of the king's warriors and the bare, hardened feet of his slaves. She could feel the Tepanec's presence like her own pulse in her neck, stronger than the silent throng of people around them. A multitude of many, like her. She raised her head slightly, rolled her eyes upward and caught a glimpse of his jewelry and his strong, painted jaw. Subtly tilting her gaze to one side, and a cheekbone came into view. He smiled when he spoke and his great steady shadow loomed in front of the sun. He didn’t see her, she thought, with the strange thrill of disobeying her sister— _but someday he would._  
  


* * *

  
She circled him like an eagle: the prettier, the _bolder_ she grew. Her eagles fought in the Tepanec's wars and her leaders paid him his tribute, but she knew his name. Knew him as intimately as words put to music. He was a man and she was a woman, but oh they were something that soared higher than that. Her blood was a thick and silty river into which the lives of other men flowed. She called herself Tlalli. But only sometimes, when liked the way her voice sounded in an echoing room. It was only a woman’s name; like makeup or the sheen of freshly-combed hair, it was a thing that was beautiful only so long as it lasted. The Tepanec, he called himself Necalli, and sometimes she said his name too, more softly, to herself.   
  
She had started to hunger for things on long rainy seasons overlooking the lake and the city of Azcapotzalco. Necalli beside her—inside her—tender and rough. Alone with her thoughts she liked to imagine his voice, his soft smirk, the way he might groan as she raked her fingernails down his back. But now it was barely enough. Friction and sweat, his rough hands, his hot tongue, her thighs shaking, back arching into the shape of his palm as he moved in metronome with her. Murmuring his name to herself, and to him, softly straining at first and then louder as the syllables ceased to have any meaning, gripping him by the shoulders and clenching her thighs around her own hand. She was not a girl anymore, and she knew what her sister called infatuation. She was hungry with the memory of the black fertile soil that he took from her at Chapultepec once. Wondering what it felt like to stand beside the Great Speaker. Wondering what the view must be like looking down. So when the Great Speaker died, she rebelled. And she won.

  
In that brief moment between uttering her prayers and seeing him spread on the altar, she almost forgot that he wasn’t a man. He wasn’t a man, so he didn’t go like men did, bloodless and limp, when the priest cut out the last of the fibers holding his heart. He crumbled. His chest caved in like a furrow in drought. His skin crusted and peeled away from his face. His eyes locked with hers for an instant, their dark sheen covered with milky white cataracts that blew away in the wind. The sound of him stopped then so utterly, and all that remained was a quake and a deep, bitter emptiness that only she and her sisters felt. And the rush, like new lives. Like new blood. The stupefied priest stared at the wet lump of clay in his hand. Tenochtitlan leaned forward. The old man caught his breath, and raised the shapeless mass over his head with little more than a tremor. “He was made from this black earth and its waters. Rejoice, for he was the child of our Lord Tlaloc and has returned to him. Rejoice… for his sacrifice has replenished us all.”   
  
That was the way it went, wasn’t it? she thought. Like rainwater replenished the wells, like rot replenished the earth, like gods replenished men, like men replenished god. She looked up and down the little veins of her hands, pale smoky blue against the surface of her skin. There were two that branched out from the wrist, diverged, converged like tangled roots. Faint creases in her hand like all the laugh lines in a woman’s face or and all the fat rolls in a newborn’s chubby jowls. The whisper of so many other heartbeats in her own. The Lord Huitzilopochtli had promised them something when the Mexica were wanderers: a vision, an island, a homeland. Aztlán. She swept her hair back over her shoulders and looked down at her children. _I could be that._


End file.
